White Male Sacrifices in the Context of Ritual Redress Josh Inocéncio
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2015 Wreckages of Whiteness: White Male Sacrifices in the Context of Ritual Redress Josh Inocéncio Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS WRECKAGES OF WHITENESS: WHITE MALE SACRIFICES IN THE CONTEXT OF RITUAL REDRESS By JOSH INOCÉNCIO A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2015 Josh Inocéncio defended this thesis on April 3, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were: Nia Witherspoon Professor Co-Directing Thesis Mary Karen Dahl Professor Co-Directing Thesis Elizabeth Osborne Committee Member George McConnell Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii Dedicated to Fritzi “Oma” Belha-Inocencio, Lenora Cope-Inocencio, Faye Nantz, Myles Cope, Thomas Greenwood, and all my Austrian and Appalachian ancestors iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to take the time to acknowledge certain individuals whose encouragement and support have given me strength during this thesis and throughout my Master’s degree: Mary Karen Dahl, Elizabeth Osborne, George McConnell, Nia Witherspoon, Lenora Cope and Joel Inocencio, Jeff Paden, Shannon Hurst, Haddy Kreie, Rebecca Ormiston, Bryan Schmidt, Andres Robledo, Cody Burroughs, Alison Frost, Chanel Kemp, Kevin Fredrick, Rae “Kingmaker” Dohar, The War Boys, and the Midnight Laboratory. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...vi INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………….......1 CHAPTER 1: AN ANALYSIS OF JERUSALEM AND THE ROLE(S) OF WHITE MALE SACRIFICE………………...........................................................................................................24 CHAPTER 2: AN ANALYSIS OF CATHOLIC REDRESS IN ERIK EHN’S SAINT PLAYS……………………………………………………………………………………………53 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………..78 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..88 Biographical Sketch……………………………………………………………………………...92 v ABSTRACT Inspired by the plays and performance art pieces of many Latina/o and African American artists who seek to resurrect indigenous beliefs as a method of political resistance, this thesis seeks to imagine possibilities for male individuals of Anglo descent and/or entrenched in a Judeo-Christian religious context to participate in challenging the violences of colonialism. Essentially, this is a thesis about religious redress. Therefore, I will explore theoretical precedents for redress set by artists of color, such as Cherríe Moraga and August Wilson, in the Americas. To bring this into an Anglo context, I will research British playwright Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem as a text that situates its protagonist Johnny Rooster Bryon in a Celtic/Germanic mythological context. I seek to understand Rooster’s actions in the play as a strategy to rectify the violences against indigenous beings that contemporary English society has forgotten and exploited. I will also research two of Erik Ehn’s Saint Plays to examine how he deploys Catholic characters and their sacrifices in relationship to Native Americans. vi INTRODUCTION Many African-American and Latina/o playwrights explore the notion of sacrifice as an act of redress that links characters with their ancestral pasts and rehabilitates an active relationship with the environment. Perhaps the most famous example is August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a play set in Pittsburgh that chronicles the journey of the African- American wanderer Herald Loomis as he searches for spiritual satisfaction and his former wife. In the play, both Loomis and the boarding house tenant Bynum use blood sacrifices1 to bind themselves with their ancestors, the environment around them, and, more subtly, the West African Yoruba orisha.2 In the final moments of the play, Loomis “slashes himself across the chest” and finds his “song of self-sufficiency,”3 breaking away from the spiritual and psychological damage he experienced in bondage. In exploring the work of Xicana performance artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Irma Mayorga argues that “redress revisits loss, demanding retribution, and a setting right of those wrongs.”4 These wrongs implicitly refer to the displacement of indigenous peoples from their homelands and suppression of native religious practices, which are the central violences that I explore in my own work. Using Saidiya Hartman, Mayorga examines how the performance of redress can refute (neo)colonial oppression and (re)establish a community-centered people that is mindful of both ecological harmony and 1 In Joe Turner, Bynum mainly sacrifices pigeons and other small birds, but Loomis’ main sacrifice is when he slashes open his own chest near the end of the play. In Bynum’s case, he works closely with the earth as “rootworker.” Loomis doesn’t actively awaken a relationship with tilling the earth, but his experience with his own shine and his confidence in wandering on his own throughout the Northeast indicates the closeness he has achieved to the environment through his sacrifice. Shining, after all, is a natural, cosmic experience, as he becomes more in- tune with the god(s) within. 2 The Yoruba orisha are a pantheon of divine beings that represent various elemental phenomena. In The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, Harry Elam argues that in Joe Turner, Ogun is the most prominent orisha who manifests himself through the actions of the men in the play. Elam writes, “The African descendants that Wilson describes are the descendants of Ogun, and it is his powerful presence that they must rediscover” (Elam 173). 3 August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (New York: Penguin Group, 1998), 93. 4 Irma Mayorga, “Re(a)d Roots: Grounding History, Identity, and Performance in the work of Celia Herrera Rodríguez” (San Jose: National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual Confference, 2001), 197. 1 an egalitarian relationship between genders. Further, Mayorga writes that Rodríguez’ “praxis does not build from a subtle methodology of feminine subversion, satire, or innuendo, but rather, performs a forthright feminist critique of the intersectional loci of gender, history, land, memory, 5 and culture made visible in the tautness of her work’s minimalist symbolic lexicon.” In this thesis, I encourage the reader to examine the productive possibilities of religious sacrifice in relationship to its necessary role in the process of redress. I arrived at this project during the first year of my Master’s degree through researching Latina/o and African-American playwrights in coursework and private conversations with my thesis mentor Dr. Nia Witherspoon. I was interested in how Latina/o and African-American playwrights and performance artists were deploying their pieces as forms of political resistance against imperialism and capitalism, especially as a way to heal past violences against indigenous populations. However, in my preliminary research, I wondered whether any white, Anglo playwrights were incorporating a similar methodology in their pieces in order to make redress for not only indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa, but also for the Celtic/Germanic and other native groups in Europe that preceded the Roman Empire and Judeo-Christian states. Of course, it is not uncommon for playwrights in the United States or England to imagine mythic pasts, but I also searched for artists who validated the sacred beliefs of an indigenous cosmology as part of accomplishing redress. Interestingly enough, my journey started with J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythic imagination in his Middle Earth series, particularly The Hobbit, which tries to map a concrete indigenous past and national identity for England. This seedling evolved into my exploration of playwrights, such as Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Erik Ehn, Howard Barker, 5 Ibid., 196. 2 Howard Brenton, among others, who confront Anglo violence against various indigenous groups in their work. With the definitions of Hartman and Mayorga, I am particularly interested in redress that initiates the reclamation of ethnic identities and accompanying religious practices. Redress in the way I use the term goes beyond reclamation in that it not only resurrects cultural practices that colonial forces have discarded, but, as with Rodríguez’ work, “is a search for an alternative consciousness to destabilize the histories of hegemony and oppression.”6 This kind of redress is particularly illuminated by sacrifice, because it requires vulnerability from the subject who seeks to repair colonial violences through reclaiming their culture. As Hartman notes in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, “redressing the pained body encompasses operating in and against the demands of the system, negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility.”7 However, there is a larger theoretical problem with applying Hartman’s ideas to the white subjects in this project, considering she is specifically addressing the African-American slave body in 19th century United States (just as Mayorga is addressing the marginalized Native American body), and acts that “defied constraints of everyday life under slavery.”8 These acts